Happy Birthday USA

  

Happy Birthday, USA. I love you! So glad to be here welcoming visitors from across the big water for the World Cup, who are amazed to find you warm, generous, bubbling with passion and good food, and so much brighter than the vision of gloom painted by the sad stiff fiberoptic men on the evening "news." You're as feisty and feral, outrageous, rambunctious, infuriating and full of paradox as you were 250 years ago, maybe more so. I especially love you when your heart pours out a rainbow, when you overflow with spunk and generosity, you spread a broken fallen feathered hug enfolding cowboys and shamans, Christians and Muslims, gay Ken and Safari Barbie, because we're all dipped in the same Ranch Dressing, and if I wanted to live in any other country, I would. You have spicy buffalo wings and red slippers. You have a blank natal chart swirling with un-scribbled stars. You are much more than the two dysfunctional outmoded political parties your Founders never wanted and who can't be found in your Constitution. You are the moose standing motionlesss in the Montana forest, the orca rolling through the mirror of the Salish Sea, the homeless wanderer fishing for his dinner in a trash can, who looked into my soul and said, "I am not taught, I learn," the baby born in no man's land East of Laredo. You are my beloved Seattle Seahawks, who win super bowls without being noticed. You are an eighty year old lady with a wisp of purple hair hiking on Mount Shashta who says, "I am not a Republican or a Democrat, I just Am." You are me letting my mother's parakeets go and seriously believing I could fly after seeing Peter Pan when I was five. You are a country road taking me home to West Virginia. To Broken Bow, Idaho. To Friends Hospital, the first mental asylum in America, founded by Quakers. I love you, USA. Happy Birthday. If I wanted to live anywhere else, I would.